Monday, March 4, 2013

Fungal Roots

Like Merry in Lord
of the Rings and Alice in Alice in Wonderland, to name a few, I am
fond of mushrooms, even picking them in the field with my partner. Recently, I noticed that the word for these
fungal growths is extremely different in each language, even among
Indo-European ones. Therefore, I looked
in the sources of its name, which were almost all, surprisingly, quite obscure.

The French use
the word champignon, which comes from the Latin campaniulis,
field. Since some mushrooms are found in
fields, that is quite logical. I am a
bit confused why the Italian funghi, funguses, never transferred to
French as in the much more modern espresso/expresso.

The Russian word
call it гриб [grib]. According to
one source, it appears to be derived from one of a few words describing a mound
or hill, грести
[gresti] or горб
[gorb]. Again, the topographical
feature, albeit different from the French, seems to be determining.

By contrast, the
Hebrew word פטריות
[petriot], mushroom, and its cousin תפטיר [taftir], mycelium or
spores, appear in the Bible. It is a bit
of a chicken and egg problem, but actually posed an issue for the matter of
blessing. The decision was that
mushrooms are not blessed like fruit and vegetables, not being sufficiently
earthy. Another theory is the root of
these words is פטר [ptor], which means break. The logic is that mushrooms break the
earth. So, Hebrew takes a biological or
agricultural approach.

The origin of
the mushroom is like its nutritional value.
It may be poor or obscure, but that doesn’t stop people to adding it to
salads, sauces, or omelets, to name a few.
Mushrooms are funghi to pick, prepare, and eat, wherever they come from.